Tag Archives: Friends

Well I’ve done it!!!!! I’m finally here and so far best decision I have ever made.

So to continue where I left off….

Got back from the 10 day trip to Spain after we found our new home. With complete excitement now I knew where I was moving to, it made me more motivated to get everything sorted.

Every day for 2 weeks I allocated 2-3 hours a night to pack and sort things. It was a case of just having a load of boxes and distributing things for storage, Spain, the tip, my friends and the charity shop.

I think it taught me a great lesson on never to hoard stuff I don’t use or need in future, I was finding all sorts of crap that I had kept for 10-15 years, never seen, never used and was thinking “Why on earth did I keep this”.

Had a slight embarrassing moment when I took some bags to the tip and the tip men stumbled upon my “female toys” and decided to wave them about while I was stood right in front of them all. FML!!!!

I think the secret to calmly achieving a huge move like this is just to break down the tasks and not look at the whole picture.

I remember an episode of friends where Chandler is about to marry Monica and he gets cold feet and runs off. Ross goes to find him in his office to try and lure him home. In an attempt to calm him down he says to try and just take it a step at a time.

“Y’know, okay. You’re right. It is huge. So why don’t we take it just a little bit at a time? Okay? Umm, forget getting married for a sec; just forget about it. Can you just come home and take a shower?”

All you have to do is write lists of what needs to be achieved and by when. “Pack box and take to the tip by Wednesday”….that doesn’t seem too hard or scary does it.

A little bit at a time and this is the end result

storage

Click image for slideshow

The weekend I actually moved out was quite a mix of emotions. I was sad to move out of my house, I was sad to sell my car, I was sad to say goodbye to all my friends…but overall just so excited about my new adventure to come.

I stayed at Math, Penny and Nick’s house in Long Eaton for the weekend as my flight wasn’t until Monday and had to move out my house by the Saturday.

They very kindly drove me to the airport, which I really appreciated. Said goodbye and headed on the plane

So arrived Monday night and stayed in a hotel in Alicante. Went to the train station the next day to hire a car and head to the Villa. Everything went swimmingly. Managed to find the place again and get all settled in.

Went to the supermarket to stock up and did an entire shop for €29…bargain!!!

Here are a few random pictures around my new house.

Spain House

Click image for slideshow

I was a bit worried as Charlie left for a job the day I got there so was going to be on my own for 2 weeks. But I was brave and ventured out to the local restaurant to find some friends.

Luckily I spotted a car rental place on the way which I met my first friend Joerg. He’s a nice helpful German chap (that also speaks in 4 languages).

Unfortunately my shipment got delivered on the Friday and it looked like they had dropped my computer tower from a great height…. OMG!!!!

Out of everything that was the one thing I needed to get there safe. Everything else is replaceable. Thankfully I had taken out the main hard drive to carry as hand luggage so I didn’t lose all my files.

Joerg has kindly found me a new case for my computer as I wouldn’t have even known where to go. Things are very different here and will be a huge learning curve.

So on the Saturday I wandered down to the car rental place and we ended up going to a little beach bar for the afternoon. Apparently I was very smiley…. I just feel so relaxed and happy here.

Had a really nice day and then headed to the casino at night. It was a real ballache drive so don’t think I will be doing that too often.

I ended up sat next to a guy from Blackpool that moved here 2 months ago with his GF and plays quite a bit of poker.

Poker didn’t go to well, I shouldn’t play Holdem cash… I’m just so bad at it and then somehow managed to get a little lost driving home which was annoying.

So that brings us up to date. Next week I have plans with Joerg, he’s going to take me to a German beer festival a few towns over. Have a feeling that could get messy, I always try to keep up with the big boys and end up on the floor.

I’m also going to nip over and see my Cousin Helen who lives in the next town.

This move has just been the best feeing ever. You can get too caught up in your own little life bubble where things seem so important and you end up stressing over the smallest things. When really there is so much more out in the world to see and new people to meet, if you are generally unhappy with things then don’t sit about and moan…make changes for the better.

The continued attempt to be less geeky has failed again…. “Yes, another self absorbed blogger”… I hear you say.

I found an old number of Blog posts on MySpace that I used to update about 4 years ago; I remember packing it in as it always felt like homework. I used to go to a poker event and then come home and then ramble about my weekend, similar to being back at school in English class.

This time however I have a different reason for starting a blog, I don’t want to bore the world with bad beat stories and idle poker chit chat, I’m sure there is more in this world than that….and I’m going to find out.

My plan is to go off travelling for a year, starting (hopefully) in Barcelona come this October. I have already informed a lot of my close friends, family and work clients and noticed the most common reaction to the news was “WOW, always wanted to do something like that, so Jealous!!!!”… So my aims are to try and blog about the whole process and maybe even inspire others to take the leap and go and experience the world.

Two of my inspirations for doing this are Cos and Amatay who went on a fun filled trip to Thailand. Reading through their blog posts every other week and seeing what an amazing time they had really made me realise that there is so much more to see, rather than being sat behind a computer screen 14 hours a day. (If you want to read their antics click here)

So to bring you up to speed, here is what I have done and planned so far:

My biggest worry was my business, I have been struggling to manage everything recently as sometimes things get a bit crazy and I essentially try to work within 3 job roles, Developer, Support, General Admin. It’s not easy having all that on your shoulders for one tiny person.

So I have managed to get onboard a nice young developer chap that will be taking over the majority of the development work and I can take on a more manager role and deal with the admin side of things. The good thing about my job is I can work from anywhere as long as I’m plugged in.

I believe this could be a good step forward for my business; I just could never work enough hours to generate 2 incomes and be able to afford to take on a second person. This way I will have much lower living costs than I do in the UK and also would like to get a few odd jobs away from the computer, so hopefully will be able to build things up over the next year and have a proper functional business with employees and everything HOW GROWD UP AM I!!!!

I also have a few online sites that generate some income, namely Poker Satellite Centre, make sure you all sign up so you can keep me fed while I’m away

So this is the stage I am at currently, training up the newbie. Drawing up contracts and getting everything sorted.

Then the next bit is the one I’m not looking forward to, selling and sorting all my stuff out. I slowly wandered around my house the other week analysing my personal belongings. What a lot of crap we build up over the years. When I said to myself “What would I actually NEED to take with me” it’s actually very little. Why do we hoard all this pointless material rubbish?!?!

So yeah, it will be car boot sales, ebay etc etc. I plan to put my bigger/expensive items in storage and take any high value items to my mums. Sadly I realised that my Hard Drive is probably the one thing I would be distraught over if I lost, not only from a business work perspective but the years of pictures, videos and a bucket load of music I have collected.

A lot of things such as bookcases, coffee tables etc, I may just get rid of. It works out cheaper paying £60 for new ones when I get back than storing such big items for a year.

I’m also planning to sell my car, funnily enough I worked out that I would finishing paying off the car loan in October. Definitely a sign!!!! So that should give me some extra start up money.

Once I have all my stuff sorted, then the planning of where I’m going and what I’m doing. FINALLY THE FUN BIT!!!!!

I have a couple of friends that are interested in doing the same thing. So hopefully it will work out that we do this together, however if that falls through I will still be doing it on my own. Even started to learn Spanish but I’m pretty rubbish. I can say about 3 things and I can’t roll my “R”s. Not to worry, I downloaded a speech translator on my iPod.

Don’t really want to make too many plans for the actual trip, although I really would like to travel about a bit and live in a few different European Countries, I figure if I like somewhere I don’t want to have to move on for the sake of it. Or if I meet some crazy hippies that are going over to Australia or somewhere I may just hop along on their happy bus.

There are definitely things I’m going to miss, especially my friends. I’m lucky in that I have some amazing mates but hopefully they will come and visit me abroad, I’m sure they will as it’s a cheap holiday… bloody freeloaders lol :p

I’m also going to really miss Nottingham. I will have lived here for 4 years by the time I go and it felt like home the moment I landed. So much cool stuff here such as DTD Poker club and has great restaurants/nightlife. Again I have made some amazing friends and would most likely move back here (if I do move back).

One thing I’m not going to miss is Poker. I might still play on occasion while I’m away to keep my game up, probably more live than online as the Spanish Poker laws changed this year and there are no longer many sites that allow Spanish players. Although I have always done well at poker and again met some really cool people along the way, I do think it can be a very toxic environment for many reasons. I have made some very naive mistakes the last year in trusting the wrong people which has come and bit me in the ass. But lessons learned I hope, silver lining I do think it has more impact when you learn from your own mistakes. Fool me once, shame on you…. fool me twice, shame on me.

The main thing is that there always seems to be a severe lack of justice, and at the end of the day I don’t want to live in a world like that. I don’t want to always have to watch my own back and worrying about the people I can trust. I know the world in general can be like that but unfortunately in the Poker scene, probably because of its nature it can attract the lowest of characters, it seems to be quite an evil place at times.

Anyway, this is turning out to be quite a ramble and apologies for such a text based first post, but I’m sure there will be lots of cool pictures and videos to come for the people that can’t process reading the English language very well.